Nicaragua’s Rainforest and Indigenous Peoples: a Story of Falsehood, Lies and US-based Political Campaigns
Indigenous peoples and the rainforests that many inhabit are under threat. Everyone knows it. In Latin America especially, international NGOs like Global Witness and Frontline Defenders tell a story which seems self-evidently true: outsiders are exploiting natural resources, governments are indifferent or actively complicit, Indigenous people defend the forests and in return face expulsion or […]
Nicaragua launches a new plan to fight poverty and promote human development
Ivan Acosta is Nicaragua’s minister of housing and public credit, with responsibility for key aspects of government planning. In July, he presented the country’s new “National Plan for the Fight against Poverty and for Human Development.” This builds on the achievements of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government since it returned to power in 2007 and sets out […]
Ordinary Nicaraguans should guide progressive left’s stance
As elections approach in Nicaragua, there has been a spate of left-wing criticism of Daniel Ortega’s government that, to someone living in the country, seems bizarrely out of sync with what most Nicaraguans see as their pressing priorities. A string of opinion polls confirm what my day-to-day conversations tell me: that support for government policies […]
A short interlude in one of Nicaragua’s local markets
This piece is translated from one by Yorlis Luna, a young Nicaraguan living in the small city of San Marcos, on the high plateau to the south of the capital, Managua. The translation inevitably loses some of the poetry of her original Spanish. Going to the popular market in one of Nicaragua’s Pacific towns is […]
Sanctions May Impoverish Nicaraguans, but Won’t Change their Vote
In 1985, when President Reagan declared Nicaragua “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” his words were followed by a trade blockade, a ban on commercial flights and—most seriously of all—the financing of the “Contra” war, which led to 30,000 deaths. When, 33 years later, Donald […]
Why U.S. Policy Toward Nicaragua Isn’t Working
After the U.S.-Russian summit in June, there was no apparent irony in President Biden’s response to a question about electoral interference. “Let’s get this straight,” he said. “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew […]
Why Nicaragua is acting against people receiving US money to disrupt its coming elections
This short video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) explains part of the legal basis for the actions being taken against people who have accepted $millions from the US to disrupt the coming elections, or are demanding tougher US sanctions against their own country, likely to be most damaging for the poorest sections of Nicaragua’s population.
The US stake in Nicaragua and Honduras’s 2021 elections
Both Honduras and Nicaragua hold presidential elections in November 2021 and the US government has a strong interest in both, although for rather different reasons. Both have incumbent presidents who will either stand again or, in the case of Honduras, more likely be replaced as candidate by a successor seen as reliably committed to the […]
They should ask where the money comes from
This article, published in the United States, questions the stance on Nicaragua taken by the US National Public Radio (NPR), which is roughly equivalent to BBC Radio in the UK. Imagine what would happen if the US media discovered that a candidate in the mid-term elections was under investigation by the FBI for receiving money […]
Women’s rights in Nicaragua under attack from an unlikely source
Gioconda Belli, the Nicaraguan writer perhaps best known for her autobiography The Country Under My Skin, has been described as ‘an icon of Latin American feminist literature’. She spoke recently of the ‘extraordinary power’ of being a woman, and that despite this power ‘women have often been relegated to a second place, one where they […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on